Abstract

: Excessive power supply and ground currents in integrated circuits can severely affect circuit reliability and performance. Some of the problems arising from excessive current flow are : (1) excessive voltage drop (glitches) on the power/ground lines, which can lead to soft errors, and (2) large instantaneous power dissipation, which causes overheating and ultimately leads to performance degradation. Maximum current estimates are, therefore, needed in the supply lines in order to determine the severity of these problems. These currents, however, depend on the specific input patterns that are applied to the circuit. Most previous work in this area has focused on search techniques that attempt to locate the worst case current by searching for the corresponding worst case input patterns. However, since the input space is huge, search-based algorithm for this problem can take an exponential amount of time, in the worst case. In this paper, we propose a pattern-independent, linear-time alg...

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